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he had passed the knowledge along to many others. Because in that event, they would also have to die.
    How ironic that if not for him and his knowing, the Order whose members now vigorously sought his demise would not even exist.

CHAPTER
    3
    When Flinx stepped out of the hoverer and into open air he was between two and three thousand meters above the ground. At a command, the feather-light aerocomposite wings of the repeller attached to his chest and legs unfolded. He dropped a few hundred meters before the repeller’s breatherip intake snagged sufficient air and arrested his plunge. Wraparound goggles snug against his face, hands inserted into the repeller’s control mittens, he leveled off and headed for the leading edge of the nearest cloud. It was a big, puffy white cumulus. Ingesting its moisture would top off the repeller’s supply of hydrogen. Repeatedly doing so would allow a competent flier to remain aloft for as long as he wished, provided the weather cooperated and he did not get too tired.
    He soon left his fellow recreational soarers behind. They had gone east to swoop along the flanks of the mountains where rising air currents would allow them to conserve energy. Flinx preferred solitude. Effortlessly, the repeller carried him westward, high above the gently undulating forest far below. He was looking for company but not of the human kind.
    He found it ten minutes later in the form of a flock of kyl-le-kee. Their almost-transparent twenty-meter wings were tinted greenish gold, the better to allow them to blend in with the surface below and make them difficult targets for downward-plunging predators. Their torsos and abdomens were long and slim, flattened and leathery underneath to permit the occasional rare landing since they had no legs. The kyl-le-kee spent their whole lives riding the air currents of Goldin IV—eating, mating, living, and dying in the clear blue sky, only rarely making contact with the ground. They even procreated aloft, giving birth to live young. Born with inflated airsacs attached to their backs, the juvenile kyl-le-kee floated free until their newly uncurled wings strengthened enough for them to fly on their own. Only then would a cautious parent bite into the supportive airsac, whose deflated membrane soon withered away.
    Large, protuberant yellow eyes regarded the solo soarer speculatively. The kyl-le-kee were harmless vegetarians, feeding on the plethora of Goldin IV’s fascinating bladder-supported plant forms that constituted a kind of oversized airborne phytoplankton. Moderately curious, exceedingly graceful, they rolled and rose, dipped and hovered, while the peculiar entity with the prone human on its back banked and looped among them. When they grew bored, they gathered into a line and resumed their course westward. Their thin but powerful wings accelerated them to a speed Flinx’s repeller could not hope to match.
    It had been a wonderful encounter. Banking left, he headed for another cloud mass in search of new companions. When he grew tired, or when the sun began to set, he would circle back along his route and make for the landing strip carved from the woods just outside Memeluc town.
    Five thousand k’s from Reides City, he felt safe from the curious eyes of hospital staff and questing authorities. Having read and heard much about Goldin IV’s specialized and beautiful aerial life-forms, he had determined to see at least some of them up close before leaving the prosperous colony world. By the time any search for him reached distant Memeluc, he should long since be leaving the sun of this agreeable system behind.
    The cloud cluster he was approaching was smaller than the one where he had topped off the repeller’s fuel. A few small, dark, winged shapes flitted below him in its shadows. Erenweth’s besketh, perhaps, or maybe the notoriously elusive hakuh-heth. Having seen a vit of a hakuh-heth, he looked forward to the rare opportunity to observe one in person. He